I have been using online courses and youtube forever and they all have converged on a similar format. Basically, adapt a textbook to slides and add voiceover. Sometimes they'll be animated. Not for everyone but I like it for passive learning.
Being a web developer I always thought video was a strange way to deliver this information - you can't even copy the text! Videos are also hard to make and heavy on bandwidth. So after iterating on different approaches to this over the last few years, I finally started on a new iteration called useful.
Currently on rev1, so early days: https://github.com/ohmstone/useful/tree/rev-1
There are a few more things I want to add to it but I want to get back to what I was doing (the bass guitar stuff). So I will make few of these website-as-video courses based on my projects to try and prove the concept.
Some of the nerdier features useful has:
- Uses state of the art CPU-based TTS with voice cloning, realistic enough to not be distracting
- Very simple markup language to create the visuals
- Extensible slide content with simple plugin system
- Full website export with complete SEO/social metadata
- Export is a PWA, so it caches nicely and can work offline
- Self-hostable
- Export is optimized for low bandwidth, so it loads way faster than a video and uses <1/10th of the data when served with brotli
- Minimal dependencies
Beyond my own use-case I figured it might be useful for others creating courses. One stretch-goal would be for people to turn what they are learning via LLMs into low-bandwidth courses like this so we don't have people burning energy asking the same questions and watching the same 4K videos.
